Some home truths about Nikon

Nikon has always manipulated raws their raws by noise reduction and pixel replacement. That is why they can't be used for astronomy. Problems started when Nikon was so far behind Canon in the noise department they went overboard in chroma reduction. Chroma noise had to be removed at all cost irrespective of maintaining integrity of the raw files.

That's why when you pull shadows, there is no chroma noise. There is no detail either, unless you call luminance noise detail. Good thing for them is the result of high DXO scores. DxO doesn't measure IQ or data integrity. It measures proxies of IQ which can be easily manipulated. The reason why the Nikon D4 has a lower score is because there is less manipulation in the raws to satisfy certain pros, in particular detail destroying noise reduction.

Nikon has a very good jpeg engine but it still can't pull detail from raws because detail is gone or replaced with false detail. That's why the D800 jpegs are poor in detail especially in the high iso's. There is less to work on the manipulated raws.